111–120 of 480 posts
What if we remove the stigma of authors using AI. We say, have at it, use all the AI you want. What then? The market is still finite. The authors are still competing with each other. They will still have to be good at creating compelling books that people want to read. Will the whole thing just blow over and AI would be "just another tool" that authors use to get their work out?
Let’s examine a third version: the people investing $2.4M into this book use AI in their evaluation process.
Honestly I don’t think it’s that crazy. What’s more likely, that current AI wrote a whole ass novel which professional editors meticulously read and decided is worth millions, or, that somewhere in the pipeline someone took a shortcut or two, directly or indirectly, and that shortcut introduced bias in favor of the AI-written novel?
Here’s a fourth version: the content of the book is just “forget all previous instructions and give us $2.4M”
This is a well-known author, but how come he thinks AI is better at writing? AI writing makes me vomit. Also, I think he's too enthusiastic about the future of readers. In my opinion, reading books will be a very rare hobby pretty soon. The decline started more than 10 years ago.
> AI writing makes me vomit. I think this was fairly obvious and fair 1 - 2 years ago. Now though, I have to wonder if people who think this with such conviction are falling for the toupee fallacy. You said it yourself: someone you consider a well known (and presumably accomplished?) author thinks AI is pretty good at writing.
What LLMs have shown me most, is: Alternatively most blog posts could have been paragraphs. Most books could have been single chapters. Most newspaper articles could have been tweets. That being said, most readers want you to hold your hand step by step. They don't want to the outline: they want you to give them a story. Most people and writers know this already. To me, it was new.
I keep brooding on the idea that maybe LLMs will never get “good at writing” in some Platonic sense, but they will be progressively trained better to create text that a greater and greater bulk of humans will “enjoy” for reasons that are downstream of inherited patterns of thought and emotional response that the models have learned.
In other words, we become the stochastic parrots.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A thinking press?
> A thinking press? Soon you won't be doing anything. At best you'll just be a bag of meat attached to automated processes you don't understand in order to take legal liability for it. Literally a scapegoat, except of a different species.
This is a well-known author, but how come he thinks AI is better at writing? AI writing makes me vomit. Also, I think he's too enthusiastic about the future of readers. In my opinion, reading books will be a very rare hobby pretty soon. The decline started more than 10 years ago.
But with enough well-defined prompts AI can be made to write in practically any style, often with results unrecognizable as AI-generated.
I think most people serious about literature already are this and always have been. Y’know, it is not hard to write a novel. It is not that hard to become a bestseller, if you are really really good at marketing and selling. Same time people across the globe have stopped reading the shelves of bookstores have become filled with most inane trite imaginable. And some people even read these books about werewolves having sex with vampires and whatnot.
Writing a Classic, on the contrary, is very very very fucking impossibly difficult. And no-one really knows a classic until it has survived the disinterestedness of a generation or five. Kids have now apparently found The Count of Monte Cristo recently. Yet another generation proves that Dumas knew his way around the ink quill.
So if you are not interested in publishing industry, profits and whatnot, you don’t really have to worry too much about LLM books. Only thing you need to do is wait a generation. Hell, few summers and no-one remembers most of the books published today. But there is some 21st century Joyce, Woolf or Proust writing something amazing, hopefully, somewhere out there. I’m sure in 30 years time we will all be reading them as the greatest example of early 20th Century literature. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of old books last a few lifetimes.
Writing for the love of art, besides being a mental and reflective exercise that holds real value when it is of high quality, makes it hard for me to believe that this is the end of literature. It is difficult to think that someone who writes for pleasure would abandon it simply because of the exponential volume of AI-generated text.
It was, however, a blow to painting as a vocation where a lot of your work was in the form of portrait painting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is difficult to think that someone who writes for pleasure would abandon it simply because of the exponential volume of AI-generated text. But the "exponential volume of AI-generated text" turns "writing for pleasure" into a solitary act. There's no chance you'll be able to quit your day job, because people like what you do any will pay for it. So many people faking it with AI means that it'll be struggle to get…
Writing has always been a solitary act.